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“Master Rahl guide us. Master Rahl teach us. Master Rahl protect us. In your light we thrive. In your mercy we are sheltered. In your wisdom we are humbled. We live only to serve. Our lives are yours.”
Verna choked back her sobs as she chanted the devotion. It never even occurred to her to wonder if anyone noticed her.
It had all been so senseless, a young man of no ability for anything worthwhile, with no interest in any values, of no use to anyone, including himself, murdering Warren just to prove his loyalty to the cause of the Imperial Order, which was, in essence, that people like Warren had no right to live his own life but instead should sacrifice themselves for the likes of his murderer.
Richard fought to end such madness. Richard fought with everything he had against those who brought such senseless brutality to the world. Richard had given himself over to ending it so that others would not have to lose those they loved as Verna had lost Warren. Richard truly understood her pain.
Verna sank into the rhythm of the chant, allowing it to wash through her. Richard stood for everything she had fought for her whole life—solidity, meaning, purpose. A devotion to such a man, rather than being blasphemy, seemed altogether right. In a way, because of who Richard was and what he stood for, it was actually a devotion to life itself rather than some otherworldly goal.
Richard had been Warren’s good friend, his first real friend. Richard had brought Warren up out of the vaults and into the sunlight, into the world. Warren loved Richard.
The soft chant had become a calming refuge.
Verna felt a warm shaft of sunlight settling on her as it broke through the clouds. She was bathed in the gentle, golden glow of light. It embraced her with its warmth that seemed to seep down and touch her very soul.
Warren would want her to embrace all the precious beauty of life while she had it.
In the loving touch of glowing light she felt peace for the first time in ages.
“Master Rahl guide us. Master Rahl teach us. Master Rahl protect us. In your light we thrive. In your mercy we are sheltered. In your wisdom we are humbled. We live only to serve. Our lives are yours.”
The soft flow of the words of the devotion, as she knelt in the warm shaft of sunlight, filled her with a profound calm, a serene sense of belonging unlike she ever had before. She whispered the words, letting them lift away the shards of pain. As she knelt, her head to the tiles, putting her heart and soul into saying the words, she felt free of any and every worry; she was suffused with the simple joy of life, and with reverence for it. As she chanted along with everyone else, she basked in the tender glow of the sunlight. It felt so warm, so protective. So loving.
It almost felt like Warren’s loving embrace.
As she chanted along with everyone else, over and over, without pause but for breath, time slipped by, incidental, inconspicuous, unimportant within the core of calm she felt.
The bell rang out twice, a low, mellow, comforting affirmation that the devotion had ended, but at the same time would always be there with her.
Verna looked up when she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Berdine smiling down at her. Verna looked around and saw that most of the people were already gone. She alone still bowed forward on her hands and knees on the floor before the pool. Berdine was kneeling beside her.
“Verna, are you all right?”
She straightened up on her knees. “Yes…it’s just that it felt so good in the sunlight.”
Berdine’s brow twitched. She glanced over at the drops of rain dancing in the water of the pond.
“Verna, it has been raining the whole time.”
Verna peered around as she stood. “But…I felt it. I saw the glow of the shaft of light all around me.”
Berdine seemed to catch on, then, and put a comforting hand on the small of Verna’s back. “I understand.”
“You do?”
Berdine nodded with a compassionate smile. “Going to devotion in a way gives you a chance to consider your life and along with that it brings comfort in many forms. Maybe one who loves you came to comfort you.”
Verna stared at the soft smile on the Mord-Sith’s face. “Has that ever happened to you?”
Berdine swallowed as she nodded. Her eyes brimming with tears said that it had.
Chapter 31
They followed what seemed like a meandering, wandering, convoluted course through the People’s Palace, not because they were lost or because they were taking their time and picking random routes as they came upon intersections of hallways, but because there was no straight route.
The complex, confusing passage through the labyrinth was necessary because the place had not been built to accommodate ease of travel through the palace, but, rather, it had been constructed in the explicit shape of a power spell that had been drawn on the face of the ground. Verna found it astonishing to consider that this was not only a spell-form similar to spells she herself had drawn, but that she was actually inside the elements that made up the spell. It was an entirely new perspective on conjuring and one on an imposing scale. Since the power spell for the House of Rahl was still active, she knew that the configuration of the foundation would probably have had to have been first drawn in blood…Rahl blood.
As the two of them walked down vast halls, Verna could not get over her astonishment at the utter beauty of the place, to say nothing of its size. She had seen grand places in the past, but the sheer magnitude of the People’s Palace was staggering. It was less a palace and more of a city in the desolate Azrith Plains.
The palace atop the immense plateau was only a part of the vast complex. The interior of the plateau was honeycombed with thousands of rooms and passageways, and there were innumerable stairs taking different routes up through the chambers inside. A great number of people sold goods and services in the lower reaches of the plateau. It was a long and tiring climb up endless flights of stairs to reach the elaborate palace at the top, so many of the visitors who came to trade or make purchases did their business in those lower reaches, never taking the time to make it up all the way to the palace proper at the top. Even more people did business at open-air markets around the base of the plateau.
There was a single winding road, interrupted by a drawbridge, along the outside of the plateau. Even if it weren’t heavily defended it would still be virtually impossible to attack the palace by that road. The interior of the plateau offered many more ways up—there were even ramps used by horsemen—but there were thousands of troops guarding the inside passages, and, if need be, there were colossal doors that could be closed, sealing off the plateau and the palace within.
Black stone statues standing to either side of a wide, white marble hallway watched Verna and Berdine as they made their way down the long hall. Torchlight glimmered off the polished black marble of the towering sentinels, making them almost seem alive. The contrasting color of stone, the black statuary in a white marble hall, added a sense of foreboding to the passage.
Most of the stairwells they ascended were quite large, some with polished marble balustrades more than an arm’s length across. Verna found the variety of stone within the palace amazing. It seemed like each vast room, each passageway, each stairwell had its own unique combination of colors. A few of the more utilitarian or service areas that Berdine took them through were done in bland, beige limestone, while the more important public areas were composed of startlingly vivid colors in contrasting patterns that lent an uplifting sense of life and excitement to the space. Some of the private corridors that served as shortcuts for officials were paneled in highly polished woods illuminated by silver reflector lamps that added warm light.
While some of those private corridors were relatively small, the main passageways stood several stories high. Some of the largest—main branches of the spell-form—were lit from above by windows in the roof that let the light stream in. Rows of soaring columns to each side rose to the roof, far above. Balconies, between those fluted pillars, looked down on the people
passing below. In several places there were walkways that crossed over Verna’s head. In one spot, she saw two levels of walkways, one above the other.
At times they had to go up to some of these higher levels, cross bridges over the passageways and then descend again into a different branch of hallways, only to once more have to go back up in another place. Despite the up and down of the serpentine route, they steadily worked their way higher into the center of the palace.
“Through here,” Berdine said as she reached a pair of mahogany doors.
The doors were twice as tall as Verna. Carved in the face of the thick mahogany were a pair of snakes, one on each door, their tails coiled around branches higher up with their bodies hanging down so that the heads were at eye level. Fangs jutted out from gaping jaws, as if the pair were about to strike. The door handles, not much lower than the snakes’ heads, were bronze mellowed with a patina that spoke of its age. The handles were life-sized grinning skulls.
“Lovely,” Verna muttered.
“They are a warning,” Berdine said. “This is meant to command people to stay out.”
“Couldn’t they just paint ‘keep out’ on the door?”
“Not everyone can read.” Berdine lifted an eyebrow. “Not everyone who can read will admit to it when caught opening the door. This gives them no excuse to cross the threshold innocently and lets them know that they will have no excuse when confronted by guards.”
From the chill that the sight of the doors gave her, Verna could imagine that most anyone would give them a wide berth. Berdine threw her weight into the effort of pulling open the heavy door on the right.
Inside a cozy, carpeted room paneled in the same mahogany as the tall doors, but without any more of the carved snakes, four big soldiers stood guard. They looked more fearsome than the bronze skulls.
The closest soldier casually stepped into their path. “This area is restricted.”
